Find here all the episodes of the series “The false good ideas of summer”.
At the bottom of every liquor cabinet in France – for those who still have one – lies a slightly dusty bottle, four-fifths full, that we hesitate to offer at aperitif or digestif time. It is a bottle of limoncello, port, ouzo, or any other beverage brought back from vacation. The missing fifth, we drank it a few days after returning, before realizing that although we had enjoyed our vacations in Italy, Portugal, or Greece, we were ultimately not such a fan of their traditional drink.
It’s the “limoncello effect.” It refers to the mysterious phenomenon that sees thousands of reasonable people each summer buying bottles of alcohol and other products that change taste once they’re relocated. My cousins Basile and Clara brought back a bottle of pisco from Peru, several moves ago. It turns out that the taste of alcohol has mysteriously mutated in Indre-et-Loire. As for adding an egg white to a cocktail, it’s less appetizing once you’re home than in the Andes.
The limoncello effect is of course observed for alcohols (raki, chouchen, sake, Amarula, perfumed planters, colored liqueurs, etc.), but also for many other products. Experts on the phenomenon even believe that it can apply to human beings, when it comes to finding in Orléans and in the rain the person for whom one had a crush at the campsite in Sardinia.
An ideal gift
But to stay on the subject of food memories, let us note that all countries produce a soft and sweet pastry, sold in airports, which changes name depending on the place – nougat, torrone, loukoum, giurgiulena –, and which makes an ideal gift. My friend Frédéric, for example, does not leave Quiberon without picking up three kouign-amann at the Riguidel bakery, but is surprised every year that they lose their appeal once they are in the bottom of his Parisian fridge.
Before that, when Frédéric went to Corsica, the owner of the campsite offered him a bottle of myrtle on the day of departure, but there too, once consumed in a Parisian F3 instead of the beach bar, the alcohol changed flavor. Even more surprising than this alteration of taste is our inability to learn from it. The following summer, we will definitely come back with a small vial.
How can we explain this strange phenomenon? Perhaps first of all because, as we all know, we lose our discernment on vacation. Perhaps the bottles of limoncello shaped like the Leaning Tower of Pisa only serve to further confuse our senses so that we can no longer distinguish a good idea from a bad one. Just as a foreign tourist in France, faced with a packet of colored pasta shaped like the Eiffel Tower, loses all his reference points.
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